Nobody wants to hear this and it just upsets people when it’s mentioned, but it needs to be talked about. It’s a no-brainer for some of us though, isn’t it? You introduce a slew of mind-altering drugs into a population, and suddenly you’re shocked—shocked!—that there are side effects we didn’t bargain for. Let me lay it out for you: kids never popped SSRIs like candy because they didn’t exist, and now that they do, we’re reaping the whirlwind.

I’m not taking anything away from the fact that these medicines may do wonders for some people. But when they have the opposite effect, nobody wants to talk about that. Nobody wants to talk about the “side effects”.

Before the early ’90s, what did we have? We had kids learning to cope, learning resilience, and building character the old-fashioned way. Were there struggles? Sure. But communities came together; we dealt with our problems face to face. Then came the magic pill revolution. Suddenly, every hiccup in a child’s life needed a pharmaceutical solution. Can’t focus? There’s a pill for that. Feeling sad? There’s a pill for that too. Never mind teaching coping mechanisms or looking at the root causes—just slap a prescription on it and call it a day.

So here we are, in the era of the most medicated generation in history. And what’s the fallout? We’ve got kids who’ve been on SSRIs since before they even hit puberty, brains bathed in serotonin before they’re fully developed. The FDA slaps a black box warning on these things for a reason. Increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in adolescents? Check. But let’s not stop there. Homicidal thoughts, rage, aggression—these are the demons we’ve uncorked. The drug companies literally tell you these are the unwanted side effects.

The most twisted irony of all? These drugs are prescribed to make kids feel better, to ‘fix’ whatever ails them. But we’re not fixing anything if we’re cranking up the dial on violent impulses in the process. We’re playing Russian roulette with neurochemistry, and the bullets are real.

Think about it. We’ve got entire generations of kids who’ve never known life without these substances. They’re guinea pigs in an uncontrolled experiment where the consequences are deadly. We’ve traded in the temporary pain of growing up for a permanent underclass of medicated zombies, and we’re surprised when some of them turn violent?

It’s about time we wake up and smell the pharmaceuticals. This isn’t progress; it’s a massacre of the mind, and the collateral damage is all around us. We need a return to sanity, to a time when not every mood swing was a mental disorder, and not every childhood challenge was met with a pill bottle. Because if we don’t, we’re not just gambling with the lives of our kids—we’re gambling with the future of our society.

Where did we go wrong? When you look back at the history books, back to a time between 1900 and 1989, school shootings were a rare and shocking anomaly. Most of these acts of violence were perpetrated by adults—adults who had grievous disputes or adult grievances. They were not children, not students, not the young faces we see walking down school corridors today.

Fast forward to the 1990s, and the fabric of society starts to tear at the seams. Suddenly, it’s not just adults who are walking into schools with weapons; it’s the kids themselves. The very students who are supposed to be scribbling notes, daydreaming about the weekend, worrying about crushes and pop quizzes—they’re coming armed, and they’re coming with a vengeance that is as incomprehensible as it is horrifying.

What happened in those intervening years? What changed so drastically that school, a place of learning and growth, became a backdrop for the kind of tragedies that tear communities apart and leave scars that may never heal?

In the ’90s, we saw a disturbing trend emerge, a trend that has only escalated, spiraling out of control with each passing year. Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland—names etched into history for the most tragic of reasons, representing a failure that is collective, a sorrow that is national.

Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), despite being discovered in the 1970s, did not enter widespread clinical use until the 1990s. Fluoxetine (Prozac), the first SSRI, was approved by the FDA in late 1987 and became available in 1988, marking the advent of SSRIs’ therapeutic application. However, it was during the 1990s that SSRIs truly gained prominence. This period saw a significant increase in prescriptions as the medical community became more familiar with their safety profile and efficacy. SSRIs offered a new hope for patients with depression, as they had fewer side effects compared to older antidepressants like tricyclics and monoamine oxidase inhibitors. By the mid to late 1990s, SSRIs had become the first-line treatment for depression in many countries, reflecting a shift in psychiatric medication practices. Their use expanded to include a range of anxiety disorders, making them some of the most commonly prescribed medications globally.

We used to send our kids off to school with lunchboxes and words of encouragement. Now, we send them off with the weight of knowing that their classroom could be next. We practice lockdown drills and speak in hushed tones about mental health and bullying, but the shootings have not stopped. They’ve become a specter haunting the halls of education, a specter we can’t seem to exorcise.

Enough is enough. It’s time to demand action, to insist on change that goes beyond thoughts and prayers. Our children’s lives are not footnotes in a debate about rights and freedoms; they are the very essence of what we should be protecting.

The correlation between the rise of SSRIs and the rise of school shootings is too glaring to ignore. It’s a conversation we need to have, with open minds and a willingness to admit that maybe, just maybe, we took a wrong turn somewhere along the way.

Some people will tell you it’s a stretch, that you can’t link the two, but think about it—these medications are designed to alter brain chemistry. And sure, they might help some individuals, but what about the others? What about the ones who experience the darker side effects that Big Pharma glosses over in the fine print? We’re talking about increased risks of suicidal ideation, aggression, and emotional blunting. Now, place those side effects in a high-pressure environment like a school, where social tensions run high. It’s like adding fuel to an already smoldering fire.

To give a rough idea of the prevalence from past data, a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicated that as of 2011, about 3.7% of children aged 12-17 were reported to be taking medication for depression. It’s also known that the prescription rates for psychiatric medications, including SSRIs and antipsychotics, have generally increased over the years. we’re talking over a million teenagers taking antipsychotics. For every one person that needs them there’s probably a hundred that don’t. Pharmaceutical companies are creating time bombs!

We’re not just talking about numbers here; we’re talking about lives—students and teachers whose futures are snuffed out in a hail of gunfire. And for every shooter who’s been on an SSRI, that’s one too many for it to be a mere coincidence. We need to start connecting the dots and asking the hard questions about what we’re doing to our children’s brains and, in turn, to our society.